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by Caroline Grannan · Jun 11, 2009 · EDUCATIONRead More »
Newsweek Magazine has once again compromised both credibility and ethics by releasing its annual high school rankings feature. The "rankings" are based on one single measure - one that is invalid as a gauge of quality and simply does not measure how "good" a high school is. They also violate journalistic ethics, as the gauge is one that directly promotes increased profits for an enterprise run by Newsweek's parent company.
The rankings are based entirely on the single criterion of how many AP (or two other similar) tests are taken by the students in the school. That's it. How the students perform on the tests is not part of the equation.
Newsweek's description: "Public schools are ranked according to a ratio devised by [reporter/editor] Jay Mathews: the number of Advanced Placement, International Baccalaureate (IB) and/or Cambridge tests taken by all students at a school in 2008 divided by the number of graduating seniors."
This is so clearly not a valid gauge of a school's quality that it's hardly worth wasting words explaining. The criterion is also subject to easy manipulation, needless to say.
Here's why this feature compromises Newsweek's ethics. Newsweek's parent company, the Washington Post, also owns Kaplan, the test prep powerhouse. It's also hardly necessary to explain that encouraging more students to take AP tests directly correlates with increasing Kaplan's business.
Standard journalistic ethics call for avoiding the appearance of conflict of interest. The Newsweek high school rankings emblazon the appearance of conflict of interest across the heavens.
An increasing chorus of dissenters complains each year about this feature - including some of the "winners." In May 2008, the superintendents of 38 high-performing school districts signed a letter to Newsweek protesting the feature and requesting that their districts be excluded (a toothless request, but a meaningful gesture). This year, a top education reporter in Dallas - the location of two of the top-ranked schools - questioned the rankings' credibility.
It's not just time-wasting but also harmful to pass authoritative-looking judgments on schools based on invalid criteria. Meanwhile, with the very survival of the news media under threat, journalistic credibility is one asset the media should struggle to keep. Newsweek is making a big mistake to compromise its ethics so shamelessly. The magazine needs to eliminate and renounce this corrupt and damaging feature.
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by Caroline Grannan · Apr 28, 2009 · EDUCATIONRead More »
I’ve been musing a lot on the extent to which the U.S. mainstream press bashes, blames and demonizes teachers’ unions, while so often writing admiringly and unquestioningly about charter schools.
(Back to charter schools later.)
There’s a notion that it’s impossible to “get rid of” bad teachers. The pro-privatization, anti-union right wingers like to raise an outcry about “the dance of the lemons” –- situations in which problem teachers get shuffled from school to school. And the mainstream press -– even liberals -– joins in.
Those voices constantly cite teacher “tenure” as the evil to end all evils. Here’s how Merriam-Webster defines tenure:
“…a status granted after a trial period to a teacher that gives protection from summary dismissal.”
It seems to me that anyone who has ever worked for an employer would view “protection from summary dismissal” as a reasonable right for workers. That would include most every employee of the mainstream media corporations –- who I have a feeling haven’t thought this through when they do all that bashing, blaming and demonizing of teachers.
I've seen situations in which it was indeed difficult to “get rid of” a problem employee. I’ve seen them both with teachers, in my life as a public school parent and advocate, and also with union newspaper employees, in my previous career as a daily-newspaper copy editor.
In my observation -- while union contracts did indeed help protect those problem employees’ jobs and make it impossible to “summarily” fire them -- in every case I’ve seen, it was poor management judgment that led to the situation. I recall several cases in which my newsroom colleagues, including union activists, were voicing serious and legitimate concerns to management about new employees still in their probationary periods -- and went ignored. Then when the problems blow up later, “the union” gets the blame.
Of course, that said, it’s still a terrible situation when poor management decisions result in problem teachers in the classroom. It’s a challenge balancing protecting employees against arbitrary or retaliatory management actions with the ability to terminate a problem employee. But my newsroom colleagues need to remember that they want and feel they deserve legitimate job protections too -– if teachers are the goose, newspaper journalists are the gander.
To switch animal metaphors, the elephant in the room regarding teachers’ union contracts is seniority rights. My experience (again, as a parent and advocate, not truly an insider) is with a large urban school district, so I can’t really say how this translates to a different type of district. But in our district, in general, when there’s an opening for whatever reason, a teacher with seniority may choose to step into it, generally coming from another school. That frustrates school administrators and school communities, because they may have little to no say in who winds up in the front of the classroom.
The fact that charter schools don’t have to abide by such protections gives them the advantage of truly getting to choose their teachers. One could argue that that’s a short-term advantage with a long-term downside, since in the big picture, that means charter school teachers lack a significant employee benefit -- job security. That lack is likely to lead to high turnover (a significant problem in charter schools nationwide) and less job satisfaction, meaning that charter schools will in the long run be less desirable employers and are likely to have trouble attracting and keeping the best teachers.
If that lack of seniority protection were extended to every school, it would make teaching -– already hardly a cushy job -– an even less attractive calling. That would be bad for schools, kids and public education
Meanwhile, back in the news business, seniority rights are currently a huge issue, with newspapers around the nation teetering on the brink of collapse and implementing or threatening mass layoffs. My own family’s life and financial security was hugely and directly impacted when the union that represents San Francisco Chronicle newsroom employees voted a few weeks ago to give up seniority protection, in the face of imminent threat of the collapse of the company.
This is not just a San Francisco Chronicle issue, needless to say. Newsroom employees everywhere have lost, are losing or are likely to lose their seniority protection, with as devastating an impact on them as this has had on my family.
Mainstream journalists and commentators might really want to think about that a bit more when they praise charter schools because of their lack of job protection for teachers, and when they bash teachers’ unions over the same issues. When you create a general perception that job security is a frivolous and burdensome employee perk, you may wind up weakening your own job security still more.
I’m pretty convinced that those of my journalistic colleagues who buy into the union-bashing and charter-hyping are generally not callous or hypocritical but rather than they haven’t given this enough thought. It's time to do that thinking, though.
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by Caroline Grannan · Apr 12, 2009 · EDUCATIONRead More »
There’s a growing chorus protesting the takeover of public school districts by what blogger Jim Horn calls “vulture philanthropists” – the billionaire, non-educator business titans who are bent on imposing their vision for the education of low-income inner-city minorities. That often means obliterating existing schools and replacing them with charter schools run by managers from outside the community.
One of the most sincere, and surprising, of the voices of protest belongs to Diane Ravitch, longtime education commentator who is a fellow at the Hoover Institution (the heart and soul of anti-public-education “reform” advocacy) and former Assistant Secretary of Education in the George H.W. Bush administration.
Writing from New York, where she has become a sharp critic of Michael Bloomberg’s mayoral takeover of the city’s school system, Ravitch declares: “It appears that the Big Money has placed its bets on dismantling public education.”
Today’s highest-profile venture philanthropists are Bill Gates, who needs no introduction; real estate development king Eli Broad; the Walton family of Wal-Mart fame; and Don Fisher, founder of the Gap. “The Billionaire Boys Club,” Ravitch observes, “know what needs to be done, and they don't see the point of listening to such unenlightened types as parents and teachers.”
From the outside it would seem to make sense to just move in and shutter a struggling school and start anew with a different model. On the ground, it may be another story, as school communities are fragmented – some scattered among the new schools, with the most challenged and highest-risk students winding up at the most marginalized of the existing schools.
"Model programs tend to skim off those kids who are already better positioned (thanks to better home environments, greater natural gifts, savvier or better-educated parents, etc.)," writes Sara Mosle in Slate. "Regular public schools are left with a more distilled population of struggling students."
Where I live, in the San Francisco Bay Area, this is falling most heavily on Oakland. My own city, San Francisco, has a fairly high-functioning urban public school system – largely because the city’s astronomical housing prices are pushing the lowest-income (and thus often most-challenged) families out of the city. San Francisco is also a mecca for Asian immigrants, who (overall, on average) tend to be high academic achievers, which strengthens our schools. So while the school district where I live is of little interest to those forces, our neighbors across the bay in Oakland bear the brunt. The Oakland-based Perimeter Primate blog (written by Sharon Higgins, who blogs on change.org as well) has become a valuable source of information and research on the billionaires’ experiments with the beleaguered school district.
A new research paper, "The Politics of Venture Philanthropy in CharterSchool Policy and Advocacy," by University of California, Berkeley Associate Prof. Janelle Scott, examines the history and impact of such projects.
“[T]here is in fact a long history of wealthy, mostly White philanthropists funding and shaping the education of African-Americans and other communities of color in the United States – sometimes in ways that opened their access to education and often in ways that restricted it,” Scott writes. She describes schools and other projects created by the Julius Rosenwald Fund: “Although there is no question that these institutions provided opportunities for students that otherwise might not have existed, the schools were also originally organized around specific notions of what African-Americans’ social status should be, usually aligned with training students for industrial and service work.”
The backlash against the 21st-century version of venture philanthropy reveals itself in this account in the Michigan Citizen of “[t]he alliance to completely dismantle the Detroit Public School system, and in this video clip of a fiery New York City Councilman Charles Barron denouncing the push to impose charter schools throughout New York City.
.“At some point,” concludes Diane Ravitch, “the music and the upheaval will stop. But when it does, will there still be a public school system? Or will the schools all be run by hedge fund managers, dilettantes, and EMOs [Education Maintenance Organizations]?”
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by Caroline Grannan · Apr 11, 2009 · EDUCATIONRead More »
You could make a creepy pastiche of quotes from news coverage (at least while there is still a press in the United States) of rogue charter and, in this case, voucher schools. This one is from Milwaukee, site of a pioneering private-school voucher program that has been cheered for years by the national education reform crowd -- or "education deform," as the less starry-eyed would put it.
Thank goodness for freedom from burdensome bureaucratic regulations.
If Milwaukee school officials aren't seriously planning to end the voucher experiment, it's a chilling testament to the power wielded by the wealthy and influential forces pushing their agenda on public education in our country. And President Obama, who has been unaccountably influenced by the school reformers, needs to take another look at what he's buying into.
Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel
Dispute over state funds leads to closure of voucher school
Kids, parents fault school for harsh treatment, academic failings
By Alan Borsuk
April 2, 2009
Only a few things are known about LaBrew Troopers Military University School.Among them:
The school has received more than $4.5 million from the State of Wisconsin in the last six years.
No one in the general public knows anything about how students have done academically.
The most vivid pillar of its program has been its emphasis on physical discipline - making students carry desks over their heads, twisting their arms until they "give," forcing them to do push-ups for infractions.
One student said he fell asleep in class because he wasn't feeling well. His punishment, he said, was a pitcher of water poured over his head.
Several students, including one who was 6, said if that they did something one of the school's sergeants didn't like, their arms would be twisted behind their backs until they were in pain. "You give?" they would be asked. They would be held that way until they said, "I give."
Others described doing push-ups while propped on milk crates until they were so tired they fell off the crates, and getting their wrists bent forward by force until the children were in pain. A girl, 9, said her punishments included carrying around a bag of sand.
... None of what the adults and children said involved why the school is in trouble. State regulation allows almost no oversight over the programs in the private schools, short of the health or safety of students being threatened. LaBrew is not required to release any information on test scores or other data about student performance, and it has not done so.
